Nordahl Grieg

Nordahl Grieg (born November 1, 1902, Bergen, Norway—died December 2, 1943, over Berlin, Germany) was a lyric poet, dramatist, and novelist; a socially committed writer whose resistance to the Germans during the occupation of Norway and subsequent death in World War II made him a hero of postwar Norway.

Grieg studied at King Frederick’s University (now the University of Oslo) and at Oxford and spent some time at sea. His first books were the sea poems Rundt Kap det Gode Haab (1922; Around the Cape of Good Hope), influenced by Rudyard Kipling, and the novel Skibet gaar videre (1924; The Ship Sails On), which deals realistically with the sailor’s life. In spite of his cosmopolitan outlook, he was strongly nationalistic, and his love for Norway was expressed in the poetry collection Norge i våre hjerter (1929; “Norway in Our Hearts”).

After writing six highly personal essays on John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Rupert Brooke, C.H. Sorley, and Wilfred Owen, published as De unge døde (1932; “The Young Dead Ones”), he spent two years in Moscow (1932–34), where he became a communist. Russian theatre and especially the techniques of the cinema inspired his most powerful social play, Vår ære og vår makt (1935; Our Power and Our Glory), denouncing profit-seeking owners of the Norwegian merchant fleet in World War I. Nederlaget (1937; The Defeat), a play dealing with the Paris Commune of 1871, was inspired by the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938 Grieg published what some consider his best novel, Ung må verden ennu være (“The World Must Still Be Young”), which exhibits his political passion and wholehearted identification with the Russians. The novel, set in England, Russia, Spain, and Norway, affirms Grieg’s particular espousal of a romanticism conjoined with a well-developed sense of reality. However, it contains only doctrinaire images of Norway and sketchy pictures of the Spanish Civil War.

When Germany occupied Norway, Grieg escaped to Britain with the Norwegian government-in-exile, and in his war poems (All That Is Mine Demand: War Poems of Nordahl Grieg, 1944; Friheten [“Freedom”], published in Norwegian, 1945) and radio talks he became a leading voice of free Norway. He also participated in the war actively and was killed in an Allied bombing raid over Berlin.